Paul Redding

Between 1933 and 1939 Alexandre Kojève gave his series of celebrated lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Importantly, Kojève claimed to be reading Hegel in the wake of a philosopher whom he considered to be, along with Marx, the only important philosopher since Hegel - Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time had appeared in 1927. Indeed, Kojève went so far as to claim that Hegel’s Phenomenology “would probably never have been understood if Heidegger had not published his book”.

In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons —in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the difference between Rorty and Brandom on this issue is used to explore their differing attitudes to modality. Brandom appeals to a Kantian approach of modal realism to support counterfactual claims. However, I argue that when his approach to modality is examined in the context of current debates over possible world semantics, his own “incompatibilist” semantics itself seems incompatible with a Kantian approach to modality. In turn, I suggest that this difference between Brandom and Rorty in their attitudes to modality reveals a difference in their respective attitudes to pragmatism’s relation to philosophy in general.

Putting it very crudely, it might be said that in the much discussed opening three chapters that make up the section “Consciousness” of his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sketches and “test-drives” various models for a consciousness able to experience and know the world.1 Kant had thought of objects of experience as necessarily having conceptual (as well as spatio-temporal) form, but non-conceptual (“intuitional”) content. But for Hegel, that objects show themselves to have a conceptual form emerges as one the first lessons of experience as tracked in Chapter 1. Moreover, in contrast to Kant’s focus on the unity and stability of such form, Hegel wants to display a series in which successive “shapes of consciousness” emerge from the resolution of contradictions affecting their predecessors.2 We might say that while Kant had famously asserted the identity of “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general” and the “conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience”,3 Hegel points to the ever-present tension between them, examining the fate of particular conceptions of the constitution of objects in the light of the “experience” based upon those conceptions, and with this transforms philosophy’s task, as Kant conceives it. Thus in the place of the reconfigured metaphysical project signalled by Kant which gives a definitive map of “what reason brings forth entirely out of itself” via the discovery of “reason’s common principle”,4 Hegel radically historicizes reason into a series of particular finite forms, each driven to selfovercoming because of the constitutive contradictions at its centre

Hegel makes claims about the relation of philosophy to religion that might raise concerns for those who want to locate his philosophy generally within the modern enlightenment tradition. For example, at the outset of his Lectures on Aesthetics he claims that philosophy “has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theology”.1 What might seem to placate worries here is that Hegel of course differentiates between the forms of religious and philosophical cognition in which such a content is presented: while religion grasps this content in the form of imagistic or figurative representations [Vorstellungen], philosophy grasps it within conceptual thought, an attitude which might seem to align him with that found within the German enlightenment, for example, that found in Lessing and Kant. However, it seems undeniable that, in comparison to Kant, for example, Hegel employs forms of expression for the presentation of his own philosophical thought that are redolent with the type of imagistic and figurative locutions supposedly at home in religion. Moreover, the actual imagery employed seems to refer to the type of trinitarian version of Christianity that can seem antithetical to those forms of Christian thought that lent themselves to the sort of “demythologization” characteristic of the enlightenment attitude to religious doctrine. Such factors as these make it easy to portray Hegel’s philosophy as a type of irrationalist mysticism,2 or at least as a disguised theology with a content from revealed religion, and thus aligning him more to the spirit of the Counter-Enlightenment than the Enlightenment

Prior to Kojève's well-known account in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel there seems to have been relatively little interest in Hegel's concept of recognition— Anerkennung.1 After Kojève, however, a popular view of Hegel's philosophy emerged within which the idea of recognition plays a central role: what distinguishes us as selfconscious beings from the rest of nature is that we are driven by a peculiar type of desire, the desire for recognition leading to struggle's over recognition. While Kojève directed attention to the importance of Hegel's use of notion of recognition in the famous dialectic of "lord and bondsman" in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit,2 his reading, inspired equally by Marx and Heidegger, was nevertheless difficult to reconcile not only with the more systematic features of Hegel's philosophy, but also with what Hegel had to say on the topic of recognition within chapter 4, but especially, elsewhere in the Phenomenology.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Dilthey, in his reflections on the nature of history as a “Geisteswissenschaft”—a science of “spirit” as opposed to “nature”—appealed “to Hegel’s notion of “spirit” (Geist). Attempting to extract Hegel’s concept from what he considered the unsupportable metaphysical system within which it had been developed, Dilthey, a neo-Kantian, gave it a broadly epistemological significance by correlating it with a distinct type of “understanding” (Verstehen) that was foreign to the Naturwissenschaften, concerned as they were with explanation (Erklären) of phenomena in terms of laws of nature. Moreover, the paradigm of such an anti-naturalistic approach to history was not Hegel’s philosophical approach to history, but the strongly empiricist practice of the romantic “historical school”, found paradigmatically in the work of Leopold von Ranke.

In Making It Explicit, Robert Brandom has suggested an "inferentialist" alternative to the dominant "representationalist" paradigm within modern philosophy, an alternative based upon a form of pragmatism that he describes as both rationalist and linguistic.1 Representationalists typically think of awareness in terms of mental contents which somehow represent or picture worldly things, events, or states of affairs. Linguistic, rationalist pragmatists, in contrast, shift the focus from conscious experience to human linguistic practices, and specifically to the norms of rationality implicit within these practices — a shift from sentience to sapience — and approach the meanings of our linguistic claims entirely in terms of the normative inferential relations between them.

Can Hegel, a philosopher who claims that philosophy lsquo;has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theologyrsquo;, ever be taken as anything emother than/em a religious philosopher with little to say to any philosophical project that identifies itself as emsecular/em?nbsp; If the valuable substantive insights found in the detail of Hegelrsquo;s philosophy are to be rescued for a secular philosophy, then, it is commonly presupposed, some type of global reinterpretation of the enframing idealistic framework is required. In this essay, this assumption is challenged. br /br /Kantrsquo;s interpretation of space and time as a response to Newtonrsquo;s theologically based spatio-temporal emrealism/em is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian emidealist/em about God and the self. In turn, Hegelrsquo;s philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that overcomes the limitations of Kantrsquo;s formal approach. Hegelrsquo;s major contribution to Kantrsquo;s revolutionary transformation of the task of philosophy is, it is argued, his recognitive conception of lsquo;spiritrsquo;. While this has been widely appreciated with regard to the relations between lsquo;subjectiversquo; and lsquo;objectiversquo; spirit, it is suggested that a fuller understanding of the nature of Hegelrsquo;s emabsolute/em idealism requires a proper understanding of how this approach also applies to the domain of lsquo;absolute spiritrsquo;. br /br /

Usually, analytic philosophy is thought of as standing firmly within the tradition of empiricism, but recently attention has been drawn to the strongly Kantian features that have characterized this philosophical movement throughout a considerable part of its history. Those charting the history of early analytic philosophy sometimes point to a more Kantian stream of thought feeding it from both Frege and Wittgenstein, and as countering a quite different stream flowing from the early Russell and Moore. In line with this general assessment, Michael Friedman has pointed to the specifically Kantian features of the approach of Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle. For Friedman, the positivists should be seen as having emerged from the tradition of late nineteenth-century neo-Kantianism. Although they had explicitly rejected Kant’s analysis of geometric truth and his key concept of the “synthetic a priori” because of dramatic changes within science itself, this move should not be seen as any simple abandonment of Kantianism. Rather, the positivists had redefined the nature of the Kantian a priori, by axiomatizing, relativizing and historicizing it, so as to fit with the results of the contemporary sciences.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was born in 1646 just before the end of the Thirty Years War and who died 1716, is surely one of the most bizarre and interesting of the early modern philosophers. He was an astonishing polymath, and responsible for some of the most advanced work in the sciences of his day—he was, for instance, the co-inventor along with Newton, of differential calculus, and is generally recognized as the greatest logician of the early modern period, responsible for advances in logic not rivaled until the mid-nineteenth century. But this progressive aspect of Leibniz’s thought is paired by one that was more backward looking, deeply engaged with premodern forms of thinking that referred back through Medieval culture to the philosophy of ancient times. And alongside of his scientific advances, he is known for having created one of the most baroque and puzzling metaphysical systems in the history of philosophy—the so-called “Monadology”. For much of his life he was also absorbed in theological disputes that have now been long been forgotten, and generally thought of as alien to modern scientific modes of thought

Even among those philosophers who hold particular aspects of Hegel's philosophy in high regard, there have been few since the 19th century who have found Hegel's "metaphysics" plausible, and just as few not sceptical about the coherency of the "logical" project on which it is meant to be based. Indeed, against the type of work characteristic of the late nineteenth-century logical revolution which issued in modern analytic philosophy, it is often difficult to see exactly how Hegel's "logical" writings can be read as a contribution to logic at all. Furthermore, any tendency toward skepticism here can only have been reinforced by the well-known views of Bertrand Russell about the logical inadequacy of the "Hegelian" approach of his predecessors.

This paper examines Hegel’s claim that philosophy “has no other object than God‘ as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. On this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegel’s version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, Leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them -- the “paradox of perspectivism‘.